Spectator Life

When it comes to seafood, Britain is a curious place: surrounded by water, in which you can find some of the best fish and shellfish money can buy, and yet so often we are averse to eating it.   There have been numerous campaigns promoting British fish led by just about every chef on television. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is one. It seems almost every month that the River Cottage fellow is trumpeting the virtues of our fish stocks. Rick Stein is another; a little more successfully, from his empire in Cornwall. When was the last time you spotted a John Dory in Tesco or a fresh megrim sole on ice in Sainsbury’s?

Do you ever find yourself holding forth on a topic you hadn’t realised you cared about? You know, someone asks you an innocuous question in passing about the merits of slow cookers, or the best way to grow cabbages, and before you know it, 20 minutes has passed and you're still grandstanding. There are a few topics that have crept up on me like this during my life: I have found out that I feel extremely strongly about pyjamas (pro), low-calorie cooking spray (anti) and the TV show Stars in their Eyes. And, it turns out, burger buns. I truly didn’t believe I had anything approaching an opinion on burger buns. But the moment I turned my mind to it, I realised that, to the contrary, I had very strong opinions on this apparently benign subject. So what is required of a burger bun?

Sad things, cheese sandwiches, especially in their most basic form. Most would add a garnish: pickle, tomato and onion are the most popular. Cowards. The point of a cheese sandwich is its beigeness. This is fuel, not food. Consoling sad corporate workers at their desks. Rows upon rows of sandwiches on Tesco shelves: ‘Cheese – no mayonnaise.’ No mayonnaise is important. That would be too much fun. Everyone knows how the Earl of Sandwich repurposed bread and beef and started an eating revolution. No one really knows who first put cheese into the mix, however. The first mention seems to be from William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Nym refers to a dish of ‘bread and cheese’. It’s hard to tell whether he meant a sandwich, of course.

When George William Wilton opened his shellfish-mongers close to Haymarket in 1742, he could never have imagined that his business would still be thriving 280 years later. The place has outlived ten monarchs and is as old as Handel's Messiah. Before visiting, I imagined a typically Hogarthian scene with portly gentlemen in dandruff-flecked suits feasting on potted shrimp and vintage port. Perhaps they had dropped by for a 'spot of luncheon' before toddling off to their various clubs at nearby St James's.  Up until relatively recently you might well have witnessed just such a quintessentially English scene; sadly, the agreeable old buffers who would once have frequented places such as Wiltons no longer exist in quite the same way.

Alison Roman’s cooking is a counsel of imperfection. She serves dinner late (fine, as long as you have snacks), gets her guests to pitch in on the washing up and won’t make her own ice cream – ‘it simply will never be better than what you can buy, sorry’. ’Her ‘pies leak, cheesecakes crack and pound cakes are pulled from the oven before they’re fully baked. Lopsided and wonky, occasionally almost burned, unevenly frosted, my desserts are consistently imperfect’. In her new book, Sweet Enough, Roman wants to free the home cook from the dessert ties that bind them. ‘My hope for you,’ she tells her reader, ‘is that you strive for the animalistically irresistible, not aesthetically pristine’. The two, she finds, are ‘rarely the same’. ‘Baking is annoying.

There’s something rather wonderful about the idea of settling down for the night in the spot where one of your favourite writers once slept, played or dreamed up a plot. There are a range of hotels across London with a vast array of bookish associations: some have played host to writers both famous and infamous, while others have been commemorated in novels, poems and short stories. Their present-day owners are all too happy to show off their literary heritage, should you ask nicely. Here are six with the most interesting tales to tell. Hazlitt’s [Alamy] There are few London hotels with so existential a literary connection as Hazlitt’s on Frith Street in Soho.

Somewhat by accident, I’ve become a professional glutton. The sort of person who’ll traipse for an hour in the wrong direction, just to try the breakfast burrito that a friend of a friend’s chef boyfriend won’t shut up about. By some miracle, I get to write about it. I’m often asked about the best thing I’ve eaten recently, and where. It’s hard to quantify the exact chemical make-up of the perfect meal, but I know this to be true: it’s the company that makes a place stick. A treasured friend or a spanking new one; a cheeky flirt in a fresh city. I like a busy open kitchen, lighting low enough to hide my eye bags, quietly great service and maybe a bit of hip hop on a crackly record player. These are the places I flew to try, and would again. Choose your company wisely.

There is something very equalising about a street party. At one gathering I attended last year on a central London mews, a trust fund baby peered nervously out from his living room window before deciding to emerge, carrying two bottles of champagne and a flower vase filled with a tumultuous mess of a Platinum Jubilee trifle. When the lemonade for the Pimm’s ran out, the champagne was mixed in instead. He didn’t seem to mind. It’s good for us British to be thrust into these social settings. I get the impression that some of the Mediterranean peoples do this sort of thing every weekend: long balmy evenings help I suppose. But we are less accustomed to letting strangers in on our mealtime rituals.

The big bank holiday weekend is about to begin. You’ve made that spinach and broad bean quiche. The bunting’s ready for your street party. You’ve crafted a coronation drinking game. But there’s something missing, isn’t there? An itch that just needs to be scratched. Where’s the pizazz? Where’s the cake? As the oft-misattributed quote goes: a party without cake is just a meeting. I know, I know: a quiche can be fun, but is it celebratory? No, what we need is a good old over-the-top, lily-gilded showstopper of a cake, that you can cut into with appropriate levels of pomp and circumstance. And, boy, do I have the pudding for you. It’s hard to think of a more appropriate pudding to celebrate the coronation of a King called Charles than a Charlotte Royale.

Lots of things seem to get described as ‘once in a lifetime’ experiences nowadays, but for many of us the coronation really will be just that. So, how to make the most of the historic long weekend? Clock off from work at a reasonable time on Friday and while getting dressed into your glad rags pour yourself a glass of English sparkling wine. Nyetimber and Hattingley Valley both have appealing coronation edition cuvées. Have some friends over – as with Christmas or new year, I think the tantalising eve of the big day is always the most fun time for a party. Serve some nibbles, such as Tyrrells's coronation chicken crisps, and a Jack Russell cake from the Waitrose coronation collection (at £24.99 their Leckford Estate Brut is also worth getting as a good-value English sparkling).

There was nothing actually wrong with coronation quiche, Buckingham Palace’s suggested dish for a coronation lunch. Spinach, broad beans, cheddar: all fine. The trouble was, it wasn’t coronation chicken. When you’re following an actual classic, it’s impossible not to be overshadowed. And coronation chicken is that marvellous thing, a recipe which feels as though it has always been around because it’s so right as a combination of flavours and textures. But like every classic dish, it’s been traduced: take commercial mayonnaise, stir in curry sauce and a bit of mango chutney and a few raisins… and it’s cropping up in all sorts of weird combos now (CC scotch egg, anyone?).

Tea drinkers erupted in a fit of caffeinated rage on Monday; kettle cosies were dashed across the kitchen, bone china was placed down hastily and many people were all very cross. Twinings sparked the uproar after axing its Lapsang Souchong tea and replacing it with something called ‘Distinctively Smoky’. It has been met with near universal disapproval and branded a stain on the company’s 300 year history. Famously Winston Churchill’s brew of choice, Lapsang Souchong is a centuries-old tea thought to have originated in the Wuyi Mountains in the Fujian Province of China, with the first record of it in 1646. Legend has it Wuyi locals fleeing Qing soldiers dried fresh batches of tea over fire to expedite their escape.

The English Breakfast Society has cancelled the hash brown, calling it a ‘lazy American replacement to bubble and squeak’. Guise Bule de Missenden, the society’s founder (sounds European to me), warned that giving hash browns the stamp of approval would only encourage the adoption of other ‘unsuitable fillers like chips’, or worse ‘fish fingers’ and ‘kebab meat’. (Seriously Guise, unless you are an infant or a drunk, the latter two are not part of any normal diet.) The boffins at the English Breakfast Society need to get with the times ‘Someone has to draw the line and say no to hash browns,’ he said. ‘They are served by those who lack pride in the full English breakfast tradition.’ Well, I've had enough. I’m taking a stand.